Wednesday, March 9, 2016

How to create a strong password ?

Passwords are indispensable today and
making passwords strong is an absolute necessity. Sensitive data of
various user accounts are at risk. Cyber crime is increasing like
never before.

Though we cannot stop cyber crimes
beyond a certain limit, we can surely protect ourselves from being
victims of these cyber-attacks to a great extent. And, using a strong
password for a user account is the very first step towards that.

When we create a user account, most of
the time we go for a strong enough password which comes first in our
mind at that time. But, keeping in mind the increasing incidences of
cybercrimes and unethical hacking, if we give a little more effort to
select our passwords, that would safeguard our accounts in a lot
better way.

There are numerous ways of creating a
strong password. In this article, I would explain just one such
method. The purpose of this article is to give some idea on how to
make your passwords stronger. Please do not use exactly the same
method that is described in this article, as again, that would not be
safe anymore !

Let's first start with what a good
password should be like.

Some simple rules of a strong
password

A strong password should follow some
simple rules :

A strong password should contain a
mixture of all of the following - small letters, capital
letters, numbers and special characters like !, @, #, $, %, &, *
etc.

Do not use any
dictionary word in the password.

Do not place small letters,
capital letters, numbers and special characters in your passwords in
predefined positions. Instead, place them randomly.

Length of your password should be
at least 8.

Is not it difficult to remember a
good password ?

Initially it may seem to be difficult
to remember such passwords. But, that would not be true if you follow
some predefined secret algorithm to create a password.

Remembering an algorithm is much
simpler than remembering a cryptic password. Your algorithm should
take as input your faorite word ( a movie, a song or any other
favorite word) or even a single number and give a strong password
which is extremely hard to hack.

You may use same algorithm in creating
more than one passwords, provided you are giving different words or
numbers as inputs each time to that algorithm.

A simple algorithm for creating
strong passwords

As I already said, there can be
numerous algorithm to create a strong password. This article would
describe just one such algorithm. Please make sure you do not use
exactly the same algorithm to create your passwords, instead you may
want to use this idea to come up with your own secret algorithm.

Step 1 :

Take a single digit from 0 to 9.

I would take the digit '1' in this
example.

Step 2 :

Spell the digit in English.

O – N – E

Step 3 :

Replace O with 0 (zero).

Replace N with 9.

Replace E with 3.

You may want to use your own algorithm
to replace letters with digits.